Typhoon Bavi made landfall in eastern China late Saturday night, triggering mass evacuations and thousands of travel cancellations [1], [4].
The storm's arrival marks the second typhoon to hit the region in a single week, placing extreme pressure on local emergency services and infrastructure in Zhejiang province [7].
Bavi first struck Taizhou city at 11:12 p.m. on July 11 [1]. The system then made a second landfall in Wenzhou city around midnight [1]. The storm was characterized by its massive scale, stretching 1,000 km, or 600 miles, in width [1].
Authorities ordered large-scale evacuations to protect residents from storm surges and flooding. Reports on the number of displaced people vary across sources. Some reports indicate more than one million people were evacuated [2], while others state the number was nearly two million [5]. The South China Morning Post said that more than 2.4 million people were moved to safety [1]. Other accounts described the evacuations as involving hundreds of thousands of residents [7].
The storm caused significant disruption to regional transportation. Thousands of flights and trains were canceled as the system moved inland [1]. Following its landfall, Bavi was downgraded to a severe tropical storm [6].
Local officials in Zhejiang province coordinated the response as the storm moved through the coastal cities. The regional tropical cyclone season continues to bring volatile weather to the eastern coast of China [1].
“Typhoon Bavi first struck Taizhou city at 11:12 p.m. on July 11”
The rapid succession of two typhoons within one week suggests a highly active tropical cyclone season for eastern China. The discrepancy in evacuation numbers—ranging from hundreds of thousands to over 2 million—highlights the difficulty of real-time data collection during large-scale emergency displacements. The scale of the storm and the resulting travel paralysis underscore the vulnerability of Zhejiang's transport hubs to extreme weather events.
